Smart phones are part of the problem for me. I see a mail on my phone when I’m not at my computer that requires some time to respond and I decide to wait till I get home. By the time I get home, I have forgotten about it and unless I remembered to mark it as important or unread, it gets lost.
Also, by the time I get home I usually want to just chill out and read/watch TV. Compared to even 5 years ago, its getting harder to get any “alone time” to just brood/think/relax.
That being said, it depends on the email. What kind of email are you sending? What kind of response would it need? The ones I tend to respond to most consistently are things like “what time is your flight coming in?” Anything where I can hit respond and reply in 30 sec gets an immediate response almost no matter what.
I also don’t like saying anything complicated over email. I worry too much about it being misinterpreted and by the time I write the email with enough precision there are too many trees for people to see the forest.
To summarize: people want too much from email and I think its a poor way to communicate. But, its here for the time being so I use it.
P.S. this is coming from an C.S. major and ex-software developer who grew up with email… just for context